I’ll shoot straight with you – I’m not much of a football follower. But by all accounts (save a handful from the Seahawks camp) the refs flubbed the call and the outrage from fans is warranted.

Same goes for the outrage felt by players – but what about some of those tweets?

In a series of tweets, Packer’s offensive lineman T.J. Lang had some fun with that swear of swears – you know the one! – as he taunted the NFL to “fine me and use the money to pay the regular refs.”

In another tweet, he targeted the Seahawks: “Any player/coach in Seattle that really thinks they won that game has zero integrity as a man and should be embarrassed.”

Come on, T.J. don’t hold back on us.

A professional athlete can probably get away with publicly disparaging his organization and colleagues relatively unscathed – it’s football, after all and Lang is just saying what a lot of other people are thinking.

Lang might be able to afford shooting off tweets in anger. Chances are you can’t.

Twitter can be a very effective way to damage your reputation, miss out on opportunities and even lose a job – all in just 140 characters.

Examples abound – such as the woman who got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted that she had to weigh the “fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” Turns out Cisco is into Twitter, too, and the woman’s job offer evaporated (thanks Business Insider).

So, keeping these things in mind:

Your boss ticks you off? Don’t tweet about it.

Reached the boiling point with a coworker? Don’t tweet about it.

Don’t love what you do?. Don’t tweet about it.

And so on and so forth.

There are better, more private ways to handle such things. And, even if those options don't bring about a satisfactory result, a Twitter tantrum is never going to make things better.

CareerBliss’ Ritika Trikha recently wrote about the rules of playing Words with Friends at work. Her suggestion to avoid stringing together crude words during a game of WWF with colleagues also serves as a great ground rule for tweeting.

I paraphrase: If you wouldn’t tweet it to your mother, then don’t tweet it.

To be sure, ill-advised use of twitter can hurt your career. But Twitter can also be a force for good.

The CareerBliss Team

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